Field of the Invention
Embodiments disclosed herein generally relate to methods and electronic devices used to enable the configuration and/or control of one or more electronic devices using a separate electronic device.
Description of the Related Art
The popularity of portable electronics, such as smartphones, touch pads, PDAs, portable computers and portable music players, has increased dramatically in the past decade. As the number of electronic devices and the reliance on these electronic devices has increased, a need for these devices to interact and interface with each other has increased. One issue with the large increase in the use of electronic devices has been the complexity of the setup of these devices so that they can seamlessly provide the user with useful information and easily communicate with each other without taking a large amount of the user's time to set up.
Video conferencing has also become more popular in recent years, thanks in large part to proliferation of high speed Internet and price reductions in camera equipment. For example, dedicated video conferencing locations exist where rooms and technological resources are dedicated solely to the task of video conferencing. Typically, video conferencing locations include fixed video conferencing hardware that include multiple camera devices and one or more video servers that are capable of controlling the transfer of video conferencing data between the various video conferencing sites.
While video conferencing technology is rapidly improving, it remains challenging to provide sophisticated video conferencing systems that can be easily set up so that they can rapidly and easily interact and transmit information electronically between multiple users at many different locations. While dedicated video conferencing environments provide many sophisticated features, such functionality currently comes at a substantial cost and complexity, in large part due to these sophisticated setups requiring many different types of computer hardware that must interact with each other.
Therefore, there is need for methods and electronic devices that can be used to rapidly and easily setup, configure and/or control one or more electronic devices. There is also a need for a method and electronic device that will automatically and seamlessly provide desirable information to the user. There is also a need for a software application and a control method that allows a portable electronic device to easily setup and/or one or more electronic devices, such as video conferencing system hardware, audio devices, computing devices, home automation devices or other similar electronic devices.